Editing Nancy Mitford (section)

==Writings==

===Fiction===
{{Quote box|width=250px|bgcolor=#E0E6F8|quote= "For months, Nancy had sat giggling helplessly before the drawing-room fire, her curiously triangular green eyes flashing with amusement while her thin pen flew along the lines of a child's exercise book. Sometimes she read bits aloud to us". |salign = left |source= Jessica Mitford describes the genesis of ''Highland Fling''.<ref>Acton, p. 25.</ref> }}
Mitford had no training as a writer or journalist; her style, particularly in the pre-war novels, is chatty and informal, much as in her letters.<ref name=Hastings70/> She may have inherited some of her natural wit and sharpness of expression from her maternal grandfather Thomas Bowles, who in his youth during the [[Franco-Prussian War]] had provided dispatches which Acton describes as "extremely graphic and amusing".<ref>Acton, p. 26.</ref> Mitford's fiction, based on upper-class family life and [[wikt:mores|mores]], belongs to the genre of the [[comedy of manners]]. Her protagonists—typically, intelligent women surrounded by eccentric characters determined to find life amusing—are broadly autobiographical.<ref>Blain et al, p. 747.</ref><ref>Drabble (ed.), p. 657.</ref> 

It is unsurprising, says Thompson, that Mitford first attempted to write a novel in the early 1930s, since many of her friends were doing the same thing. What is surprising, Thompson adds, is the ease with which she found a publisher for this first book. Perhaps, says Thompson, her publishers Thornton Butterworth "liked the idea of this pretty, well-connected girl who wrote in the style ''du jour''".<ref name=Thompson86/> Mitford was later embarrassed by her prewar novels; [[Rachel Cooke]], writing on their reissue in 2011, believes she had no reason to be: "There is a special kind of energy here, and its engine is the admirable and irresistible commitment of a writer who would rather die than be boring".<ref name=Cooke>{{cite news|last= Cooke|first= Rachel|title= Rereading: Christmas Pudding by Nancy Mitford|url= https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/dec/23/rereading-nancy-mitford-christmas-pudding|newspaper= The Guardian|date= 23 December 2011|access-date= 20 June 2016}}</ref>

Critics generally place the postwar novels in a different league from the earlier efforts; Cooke describes ''The Pursuit of Love'' as "an immaculate novel that soars many miles above what came before".<ref name=Cooke/> In Acton's view it and its companion volume ''Love in a Cold Climate'' present an entirely authentic picture of country house life in England between the wars, and will long be consulted by historians of the period.<ref>Acton, p. 59.</ref> In these later novels [[Zoë Heller]] of the ''Daily Telegraph'' hears in the prose, behind a new level of care and artfulness, "the unmistakeable Mitford trill, in whose light, bright cadences an entire hard-to-shock and easy-to-bore view of life is made manifest".<ref>{{cite news|last=Heller |first=Zoë |title=Zoë Heller on Nancy Mitford |url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/7398341/Zoe-Heller-on-Nancy-Mitford.html |newspaper=The Daily Telegraph|date= 8 March 2010 |access-date=20 June 2016}}</ref> At times a more serious undertone, contrasting with the "bright, brittle, essentially ephemeral" nature of her early works,<ref>Hastings, p. 129.</ref> becomes evident; Olivia Laing in the ''Guardian'', discerns "a faint and beguiling pessimism about love's pursuit and its consequences" beneath the light superficiality.<ref>{{cite news|last= Laing|first=Olivia|title= The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford|url= https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/mar/21/pursuit-love-nancy-mitford-review|newspaper= The Guardian|date= 21 March 2010|access-date= 20 June 2016}}</ref>

''The Blessing'' has provoked a more divided response. Waugh's judgement was that those who criticised the book were "lazy brutes&nbsp;... [who]&nbsp;... can't bear to see a writer grow up".<ref>Amory (ed.), p. 354.</ref> More recently, [[Philip Hensher]] and others have argued that although the novel is immensely enjoyable and that Mitford's "marvellous voice" is undiminished, she is on less sure ground with her "Frenchness" than with the English country house ambience, and her picture of France as the embodiment of everything civilised is less than convincing.<ref>{{harvnb|Thompson|2003|pp=307–10}}</ref> Similar mixed comments greeted Mitford's final novel, ''[[Don't Tell Alfred]]'', Waugh again hailing it as her best, "clamouring for a sequel".<ref>Amory (ed.), pp. 558–59.</ref> 

In this judgement he was largely alone. Other critics perceived in the anecdotal framework of the book an uncertainty as to what it was about. An American reviewer wondered what parts were to be taken seriously: "What exactly goes on?&nbsp;... Can you always tell an Etonian, even when he goes beat? Is all modern architecture a fraud? Do U-people really talk this way?"<ref>{{cite journal|last= Quintana|first= Ricardo|title= Book Reviews: Don't Tell Alfred|jstor= 1207385|journal= Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature|volume= 3|issue= 1|date=Winter 1962|pages=81–84|doi= 10.2307/1207385}} {{subscription required}}</ref> Similar questions were raised in the ''[[Times Literary Supplement]]''{{'}}s review, in relation to Mitford's fictional output as a whole: "Would she have been a better novelist if she had 'tried harder', gone in further, dropped the pose of amateurishness, cut the charm, looked beyond the worlds that she knew and, more importantly, loved?"<ref>{{harvnb|Thompson|2003|pp=364–65}}</ref>

===Biographical works===
The gift for vivid characterisation, which Mitford developed in her fiction, was used to full effect in her four biographical works. In the first of these, ''Madame de Pompadour'', she followed Waugh's advice not to write for experts but to fashion "a popular life like Strachey's ''Queen Victoria''", with "plenty of period prettiness".<ref>Amory (ed.), p. 393.</ref> This remained her yardstick in her subsequent biographical writings. Her own description of ''Voltaire in Love'' is "a Kinsey report of his romps with Mme de Châtelet and her romps with Saint-Lambert and his romps with Mme de Boufflers&nbsp;... I could go on for pages".<ref>Mosley (ed.), p. 412.</ref> Acton thought ''The Sun King'' the most entertaining introduction to the subject in the English language. Mitford's informal style was remarked on by the literary critic [[Cyril Connolly]], who wrote that her facility for transforming unpromising source material into readable form was a skill that any professional historian might envy.<ref>Acton, p. 167.</ref> The historian [[Antonia Fraser]] considered Mitford an important contributor to the "remorseless process by which historical and biographical sales have soared since 1950".<ref>{{harvnb|Thompson|2003|p=413}}</ref>

===Journalism, letters and other works===
Mitford did not regard herself as a journalist: nevertheless, her articles were popular, particularly those she contributed on Paris life to ''The Sunday Times''. Thompson describes this series as "a more sophisticated version of ''[[A Year in Provence]]'', bringing France to the English in just the way that they most like it".<ref>{{harvnb|Thompson|2003|p=281}}</ref> Thompson adds that although Mitford was always a competent writer, it is in her letters, with their freedom of expression and flights of fancy, that her true character emerges. Many have been published within collections; they are, according to ''[[The Independent]]''{{'}}s reviewer: "a delight, full of the sparks of an abrasive and entertaining wit, refreshingly free from politeness".<ref>{{cite news|title= Review: Pursuit of bloody-minded charm: 'Love From Nancy: The Letters of Nancy Mitford'|last= Walter|first= Natasha|url= https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/book-review--pursuit-of-bloodyminded-charm-love-from-nancy-the-letters-of-nancy-mitford--ed-charlotte-mosley-hodder--stoughton-20-pounds-1508197.html |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20220618/https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/book-review--pursuit-of-bloodyminded-charm-love-from-nancy-the-letters-of-nancy-mitford--ed-charlotte-mosley-hodder--stoughton-20-pounds-1508197.html |archive-date=18 June 2022 |url-access=subscription |url-status=live|newspaper= The Independent|date= 2 October 1993|access-date=20 June 2016}}</ref>